Project Description

The project aim is to “translate” the IPCC’s latest report into a format that demonstrate how complex and crucial analyses, although difficult to understand, can contribute to a collective understanding of changing living conditions on our planet.

The starting point is that the greatest challenge posed by climate change is not just rising temperatures and sea levels, droughts, wildfires, floods, etc., but our reactions – our behavior. The extreme climate conditions underway will trigger a cascade of consequences, including new wars and conflicts, massive refugee flows, societal polarization within and between regions, and more. We are rapidly entering new territory, a place we have not been to before and have not yet developed solutions for. This concerns the future of the civilization we have spent centuries building.

Creating captivating narratives, is paramount in sparking a collective awakening that can alter our trajectory. Rewrite the story, reshape the world. As Elise Boulding said: “We cannot achieve what we cannot imagine” This is where it all begins.

With the Climate Expedition, we are on the trail of the vanishing future, which we narrate through stories, games and other experiences from a near future.

Supported by the Novo Nordisk Foundation.

Alex McDowell – Planetary Punk

Planetary Punk with mr World Building Alex McDowell and Visual Game and Media Design students at The Royal Danish Academy

Erik Rasmussen – Climate expedition

Erik Rasmussen, founder of Mandag Morgen, Sustainia, and Navigation 360, introduces the brief of The Climate Expedition, based on the IPCC's report.

Stuart Candy lecture

Critical Futurist Stuart Candy

Part of the Climate Expedition is a two months project called Planetary Punk. Visual Game & Media Design master students and visual design bachelor students from the Royal Danish Academy, supervised by Jakob Ion Wille and Alessandro Canossa, are addressing a near by future in Denmark, with rising sea levels, by combining world building, speculative design and game design,

Below are excerpts from the ongoing group projects that will evolve over the coming months and will be exhibited as part of DAC’s exhibition A World of Water.

Købendrown

In a flooded and semi-abandoned Copenhagen, a new kind of society has emerged. A society where a centralizing power is not allowed, but is instead built on tribes that have to depend on each other to survive. Although this can come with its challenges, the importance and fragility of trust, collaboration, and empathy become clear. These themes are at the core of our narrative as we follow a young doctor in her journey to help with the birth of a baby into this world.

Waterwalk

We want Waterwalk to show a somewhat alien – but still recognizable – future with a very different ecosystem which has adapted to survive the changes (pollution etc.) in the ecosystem created by human activity. However we do not want to present this world in a “doom and gloom” way – whilst many would consider this future negative, it also shows that life can adapt and move on, even from very serious changes

Rising Zealand

A story driven game about the ambivalent heartache versus sadness an abandoned Robot experiences in a post-climate-crisis flooded Danish province as it discovers how its human Dad-figure made choices for the right reasons: for the family, but it led to the crisis: a worse future for them. The game seeks to invite players empathically to look at their own choices. It’s not about shaming but a tale about the nuances of human nature, good and bad, leading to climate crisis

Losing control

You are what you own, Overstimulation , Over consumption, Not acknowledging disaster. Humoristic ant-.game provocation